Reasons for the Romanian Situation

Over 80,000 children still languish in Romanian orphanages. This tragedy has received extensive media coverage since the early 1990s, and the compassion of the world has turned toward than. While documentation issued by various human rights groups, and a small number of press reports have acknowledged the fact that in the majority of these state institutions as many as 80% of the infants are Roma (Gypsies) this has still not made an impact upon the mainstream American media.

Equally deserving of attention is the fact that while the overall population of the children so incarcerated is of both Romani and non-Romani origin, their respective presence in those institutions today is the result of two very different policies. Ceausescu had specific plans for the Roma, which were grimly reminiscent of the centuries of Gypsy slavery in his country, not fully abolished until 1864. He also brought techniques of genetic engineering - based specifically on the race policies of Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany - into the 1980s, forty years after the Holocaust in which the Roma were selected alongside the Jews for complete extermination in the Final Solution.

Not one of the current affairs oriented television programs such as Turning Point, 60 minutes, 20/20 and others have even mentioned this blatantly racist situation, even though all of them have broadcast feature programs about these children. If eighty percent of those in the orphanages were of specifically Hungarian, or Jewish, or Armenian descent, for example, this would without question be cause for instant outrage and investigation at the highest level. But those children are Gypsies and we can only conclude therefore that they do not merit concern. Ironically, some of those same programs have not hesitated to broadcast investigative reports on crimes committed by Gypsies.

Roma in Romanian state institutions

The distinction between Gypsies and non-Gypsies has been particularly apparent in the treatment of the children in those state institutions; theirs is perhaps the most tragic aspect of the Romani situation in Romania. While news of the existence of extraordinarily large numbers of children in Romanian orphanages began to reach the West in 1990, the fact that most of them are Gypsies is still not generally known. Although Romani Romanians constitute only between 10% and 20% of the national population, they make up as much as 80% of the children in many of these homes. Some are orphans, but others have been voluntarily placed in foster homes and orphanages by their parents, who maintain that they believe their children's chances for survival in an increasingly hostile society would be greater in a state institution than in the Romani community, which is under increasing attack. In a number of these establishments, especially as one travels further east in Romania, the children are given minimal routine care, and receive no physical attention, sometimes being left bound in urine-soaked sheets on the ground all day or tightly handcuffed to their beds. Many have open sores because of this, and the arms and legs of others have become deformed. Incidents of AIDS, hepatitis, and more recently cholera, have been reported, the result of unsanitary equipment and blood transfusions. Because of a lack of human love and contact during their first years of life, a frightening number of the children have underdeveloped motor and communication skills; some are unable to speak or walk or feel normal human emotions. Some are filled with an excruciating rage which they don't understand and cannot control.

The human rights organization Terre des Hommes in Den Haag reports that the annual death rate in some of these homes is between 50% and 65%. The policy of the Romanian government is to withhold the children from being available for adoption for a period of six months after they are born, ostensibly to allow their own parents, or other Romanian citizens, to have first access to them. But white Romanians don't adopt Gypsy children, and if their parents are living, they too seldom change their minds about removing them from the institutions. Thus in their first six months of life, according to the figures issued by Terre des Hommes, 25% and 32% of the Gypsy babies perish because they are not made accessible to those wishing to adopt them.

Such children are classified as "irrecuperable" or "irrecoverable" by the government, and no attempt is made to sustain them; a film entitled Romania's death camps was broadcast nationally in July, 1991 showing the mass graves where their bodies were dumped, not even in boxes after they had been allowed to die. According to that report, irrecuperables were sent to Riu Sadului (near Sibiu), "one of 170 isolated 'forbidden zones.' No visitors were allowed inside; one mile up the road is a mass grave, four football fields long. Dutch humanitarian Hans Hunink [working with Terre des Hommes) discovered the mass grave last winter. Hunink believes that most of the dead are children."

There are a number of reasons why the racial identity of the majority of the Romanian orphans has not been better publicized. The greatest demand among prospective adoptive parents in the United States is for white babies, which are not readily available in American orphanages. A report circulated by Touch Romania in Summer, 1991, stated that "[t]he great interest in Romanian adoption, fueled in part by the media, centers around the fact that the vast majority of the children in question are Caucasian." The non-Caucasian Romani children (whose genetic descent is ultimately Dravidian) in fact constitute the majority, but advertising this, it has been suggested, would adversely affect business for the adoption agencies. It is also the case that journalists reporting on the situation often approach it without any prior knowledge of Romanian population demographics, or of the history and identity of the Roma, and so make no special concession to the racial aspects of the Romanian situation. It is also certainly true that Romani children have not always been made available for adoption by the Romanian authorities themselves. They are either kept out of the sight of visitors to the homes, or those visitors are dissuaded from adopting them. A Mexican American couple from Amarillo, Texas, told the Romani Union that when they asked for a Romani child specifically because its complexion more closely matched their own, they were refused, and asked why they would waste the opportunity to grow up in America "on a Gypsy." Kathleen Hunt also reported the same attitude from a staff member at the state institution at Ploiesti, which she visited in January, 1991:

Half an hour later, Dr. Luiza Popescu strides in ... When [she is told that a visitor] is looking for abandoned babies, she snickers that most of those children are from the "baby machines," or Gypsies. "How could Americans be willing to adopt Gypsies?," the doctor asks, voicing the prejudice many ethnic Romanians harbor. "The genetics is what matters from the beginning," she declares with a sweep of the hand. "Ha! Such a child will certainly steal."

Reasons for the Romanian Situation

The Gypsy children in the Romanian institutions are the result of Nicolae Ceausescu's plan to create a superior "Dacian" people by selective breeding and population engineering. Ceausescu's fascination with Hitler's racial policies is no secret; "In the early 1970s, when Ceausescu learned that Romania had over 600,000 emigris abroad, he became very interested in Hitler's Fifth Column. That was not too surprising, as Ceausescu had always studied Hitler's 'charisma,' and had repeatedly analyzed the original Nazi films of Hitler's speeches ... In almost every speech, he recalls the Romanian people's origins in proud Roman and Dacian warriors, just as Hitler harped on the Aryans..."

Because he took pains to conceal his actions, however, and little documentation to substantiate them has so far come to light, the means by which he tried to accomplish his aims are only now being pieced together. The establishment of his "death camp" orphanages apparently pre-dated his open fascination with Hitler by some years:

Ceausescu started the camps as early as 1965. There had been years of planning. When Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp, was discovered in January 1945, Nicolae Ceausescu was 27 years old. Like the Nazis, Ceausescu advocated racial purity. Years later, he would express his concern for, quote, "the new human type we intend to mold in our society." Ceausescu had Romania's history books rewritten. He argued that the true Romanians were descended from Dacians, far more advanced than what he called the other "aboriginal" races ... "superior even to ancient Rome." Ceausescu wanted a huge robot work force.

His intention was to breed on the one hand large numbers of "pure" Romanians and on the other, those who were to make up his "robot work force," the status Roma had endured as slaves for 550 years. In both cases, like the ancient Spartans, the weak were allowed to die, since they were of no use to either population. Women, married or not, were encouraged to have many children; they were rewarded publicly for having five or more, and birth control was made illegal. Romanian officials maintain that Roma were not therefore discriminated against since this policy affected them equally. The difference, however, lay in what was destined for each group. Because of the state of the Romanian economy, and the execution of Ceausescu in December, 1989, this bizarre plan was never to materialize, but it has left a legacy in the surplus children who languish in the Romanian orphanages and whose bodies fill the mass graves reported by Terre des Hommes. That Roma are treated as subhuman in modern Romania, where the very word Tsigan ("Gypsy," but synonymous with "slave" in the Romanian language), is the result of centuries of persecution rooted in Romanian history.

Reprinted by the Patrin Web Journal with permission of the author, Ian Hancock.
Posted 1 March 1997.

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